First Indochina War

The First Indochina War was a major independence conflict in Southeast Asia which immediately followed the end of World War II in September 1945. The Viet Minh, a Vietnamese nationalist and communist guerrilla organization led by Ho Chi Minh, engaged in a guerrilla struggle against the French colonial government for almost ten years, resulting in the independence of Laos, Cambodia, and a partitioned Vietnam. The Geneva Conference of 1954 led to the division of Vietnam between the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the conservative State of Vietnam (South Vietnam), and the Cold War soon turned the newly-independent Southeast Asian states into battlegrounds during the ensuing Vietnam War.

Background
In September 1940, during World War II, Japan took advantage of the fall of the French government and occupied French Indochina, allowing for the collaborationist colonial authorities to continue administrating the region in exchange for the use of Indochina as a military base and an oasis of much-needed oil (thereby bypassing the US embargo brought about by the Second Sino-Japanese War). Many Vietnamese people saw the Japanese as liberators from white colonial oppression, but the renowned nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh saw them as another occupying force and organized the Viet Minh to resist Japanese occupation. The Japanese were cruel, hoarding Vietnam's rice supply for their soldiers during the war in the Pacific, and Ho Chi Minh was hailed as a savior when his Viet Minh fighters attacked the Japanese supply bases and redistributed the rice to the famine-stricken Vietnamese people.

When Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers on 2 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh called upon all Vietnamese to rise up and take over their own country before the Free French could re-establish their old colonial regime. That same day, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese flocked to Hanoi to hear Ho Chi Minh proclaim independence. An admirer of the United States (whose OSS special agents had assisted him and the Vietnamese freedom fighters during the war), he spoke Thomas Jefferson's words "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

In the aftermath of the Japanese surrender, the Cold War set in, and French president Charles de Gaulle warned the United States that France would fall into the Soviet orbit if the United States interfered with the restoration of the French colonial empire. The United States agreed to remain neutral as France and the Viet Minh entered into talks about autonomy. Meanwhile, the nationalist Chinese forces occupied northern Vietnam, while British colonial troops occupied the south. The British failed to maintain order as the French and the nationalists clashed in the streets of Saigon, and OSS Lieutenant-Colonel A. Peter Dewey attempted to broker a peace between the Viet Minh and the French. Unfortunately, the British general Douglas Gracey declared Dewey a persona non grata for conferring with the Viet Minh, as he favored the uninterrupted restoration of French rule. Dewey then advised his superiors that the French and British were finished in Vietnam, and that the US should clear out of Southeast Asia. On 23 September 1945, French forces overthrew the local Viet Minh government and declared French authority restored in Cochinchina. On 26 September 1945, Dewey was killed by Viet Minh guerrillas at a roadblock while en route to a flight to OSS headquarters, having mistaken him for a Frenchman.

In the fall of 1945, a week after Dewey's death, fresh French troops began to arrive in Saigon, taking over from the British and establishing their control over the city. Ho Chi Minh still hoped for a peaceful solution to the war and sought US aid, asking for the US not to be blinded by the issue of communism and to focus on helping their fellow former colony in their own independence struggle. In June 1946, Ho Chi Minh returned to Paris in a fruitless attempt to achieve increased autonomy for his country, as the French promised. Meanwhile, back in Vietnam, Viet Minh military commander Vo Nguyen Giap began to consolidate communist control over the resistance by purging members of rival nationalist parties and "reactionary saboteurs" such as landlords, moneylenders, Trotskyists, Catholics, and alleged collaborators.

The March 1946 agreement recognizing Vietnam as a free state within an Indochinese federation broke down when the French decided to occupy Cochinchina in southern Vietnam, as the original deal only allowed for them to occupy Annam. In November 1946, the French attacked Haiphong, killing 6,000 people. In December, the Viet Minh attacked the French garrison in Hanoi. France had better weaponry and naval support and called on troops from the French Foreign Legion and the French Army in Europe. The French ultimately took over the city, and Ho Chi Minh and his followers fled to their mountain strongholds far in the north, starting the First Indochina War.

War
Ho Chi Minh declared the start of a nationwide guerrilla war as France poured thousands of French regulars, European mercenaries, and African colonial troops into Vietnam to assist the Cambodian and Laotian governments and anti-communist Vietnamese forces in crushing the Viet Minh insurgency. The French immediately took over most of the urban centers, and they built dikes, schools, and roads in rural areas and vaccinated children in attempts to win the support of rural villagers through "pacification". However, the Viet Minh remained strong in the rural areas, and they mined roads, blew up bridges and railroads, ambushed French patrols, and then disappeared. French troops sometimes took revenge on local villages by burning hopes, raping women, and executing men suspected of aiding the Viet Minh. The communists also perpetrated atrocities, with one commander saying that it would be better to kill an innocent than to let a guilty person go; many of their victims were Vietnamese people with French associations. Several Vietnamese soldiers serving in the French Army were buried alive, as the Viet Minh did not want to waste bullets. French casualties mounted as the Viet Minh continued their guerrilla warfare, with convoys falling under attack, roads being cut, and the French being fired on from all directions every night as the French public showed indifference to the war.

Foreign intervention
In 1949, the Soviet Union became an atomic power, China's communist government rose to power, and communist insurgencies broke out in Burma and Malaya. In January 1950, Chinese leader Mao Zedong formally recognized Ho Chi Minh as the leader of Vietnam and agreed to provide arms, equipment, and military training to the Viet Minh. The Soviets also recognized the Viet Minh and provided modern weaponry to the Viet Minh. The increasing Eastern Bloc intervention in the war led to US president Harry S. Truman providing $23 million in aid to the French colonial government, as Truman was facing political pressure to avoid another communist rise to power in East Asia.

In 1949, the French installed Bao Dai, local emperor of the French Vietnamese province of Annam, as emperor of an independent Vietnam. Bao Dai's government was recognized by France, the US, and other Western countries, but failed to gain widespread support in Vietnam or among its neighbors, as Bao Dai was felt to be a French puppet.

Rising cost
By mid-1950, the Chinese had been turning the Viet Minh into a powerful force from training camps in southern China. In July 1950, a month after the start of the Korean War, President Truman quietly dispatched transport planes, a shipload of jeeps, and 35 military advisers to Vietnam to assist the French. In October, as the Chinese began to intervene in the Korean War, Truman increased US aid to France to $336 million, and the US public was eventually providing 80% of the funding for France's war effort in Vietnam in 1954. Truman and his successor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, saw intervention in Vietnam as necessary to prevent a communist "domino effect" (the gradual spread of communist revolutions across borders) from taking off.

By 1953, the French had been fighting for seven years and had suffered over 100,000 casualties and failed to pacify the countryside. The war soon turned into a stalemate, with the French holding the northern cities and a few outposts, while the Viet Minh held control of the northern countryside. French successes in late 1950 and January 1951 - when a Viet Minh force was trapped on open ground at Vinh Yen, north of Hanoi, and annihilated - were then reversed by Viet Minh victories from 1952 to 1953. However, the French commander Henri Navarre assured his countrymen that victory was near and was the "light at the end of the tunnel". Meanwhile, large parts of the French population were horrified by reports of French brutality and the use of napalm against foliage, homes, and human flesh in Vietnam. When returning French troops disembarked at Marseille, members of the longshoremen's union pelted them with rocks, and Parisian leftists began to call the conflict the "Dirty War".

Dien Bien Phu
In July 1953, the Korean War ended with an armistice at Panmunjom, and American policy-makers saw it as proof that communism in Asia could be contained. That fall, the French indicated their willingness to initiate talks to end the fighting in Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh agreed to meet. However, both sides sought to improve their situations on the battlefield, and Navarre set up an outpost at Dien Bien Phu with the goal of using superior firepower and air support to crush the Viet Minh in a pitched battle. His 11,000 dug-in troops on a valley floor were surrounded by jungle-covered hills, but Navarre showed no concern about his position, nor did his artillery commander Charles Piroth, who bragged that he had more guns than he needed. Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap was determined to destroy the French base, so he used 250,000 civilian porters (nearly half of them women) to carry his army's supplies (from rice sacks and artillery pieces) on foot through the jungle, surrounding the valley with 50,000 soldiers and 200 big guns, dug in and camouflaged so well that they were undetected from the air.

On 13 March 1954, Viet Minh artillery on the hillsides began to fire 50 shells a minute on the French troops huddled below, destroying the airstrip and forcing the French to airdrop reinforcements and supplies. Piroth committed suicide due to his humiliation. The French government asked President Eisenhower to intervene, but he refused to do so without congressional approval or international support. Britain refused to intervene, so the US Congress decided against authorizing military action. However, Eisenhower secretly sent in more transport planes flown by civilian contractors to resupply the desperate French troops. On the afternoon of 7 May, after 55 days of siege, the exhausted French forces at Dien Bien Phu surrendered. The fall of Dien Bien Phu effectively brought an end to the war.

A day after Dien Bien Phu, world leaders from the East and West met at the International Geneva Conference in Switzerland to discuss an end to the war. Neither China nor the Soviet Union was willing to militarily intervene in Indochina, as China had suffered one million losses in Korea, and the USSR wished to ease tensions with the West. The two nations encouraged Ho Chi Minh to accept a partition of Vietnam in exchange for peace, and he was forced to give in. On 21 July 1954, Vietnam was temporarily divided at the 17th Parallel, and the 130,000 French troops in the north withdrew to the south. 50,000-90,000 Viet Minh regrouped in the north, and a demilitarized zone was created in the center of the country as elections were held to reunify the north and south.

French withdrawal
Under the Geneva Accords, civilians from either half of Vietnam were given 300 days to travel to the other half of Vietnam if they wished, and thousands of Buddhists and Catholics fled to South Vietnam to avoid religious persecution. In the end, 900,000 refugees (including over half of the Catholics) fled to the South, many of them aboard American ships. The US sought to build a legitimate government in the south, and the Catholic-Confucian Ngo Dinh Diem, a celibate bachelor (who formerly sought to be a priest), was chosen by the US to turn South Vietnam into a democracy. However, Diem was autocratic, shrewd, exploitative, and untrusting of those beyond his family, and he detested both the French and the communists. The French occupiers of the South detested Diem, while several provinces in the South were under the control of religious sects with armies of their own, and several thousand communist workers had stayed behind in the South to organize resistance in the countryside. Saigon itself was under the control of the French-armed Binh Xuyen crime syndicate, which opposed Diem. Eventually, the US grew wary of Diem, and, on 27 April 1955, Eisenhower decided to end American support for Diem's regime. However, Diem cracked down on the Binh Xuyen and re-established control in Saigon, and the USA was left with no other option but to resume support for Diem. The French then completely withdrew from South Vietnam, ending nearly a century of occupation.

South Vietnam
Diem became immensely popular for chasing the French out of all of Vietnam, and he called for a referendum in the south. Diem claimed to have won 98.2% of the vote, having meddled in the election against the CIA's advice. On 26 October 1955, Diem named himself the first President of the Republic of Vietnam, and the election to reunify the north and south would never be held. The USA backed Diem due to his staunch opposition to communism, but Diem became the boss of the South Vietnam-US relationship, taking advantage of the USA's concern about communism to reign as South Vietnamese dictator. Most Democrats and Republicans in the United States agreed with US Senator John F. Kennedy's assessment that South Vietnam was now America's offspring and its responsibility. Eisenhower sent scores of American civilians to South Vietnam to help develop the new country, hoping to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. However, he also sent military advisers to help modernize the ARVN, the military of South Vietnam, and they found American methods unsuited to dealing with guerrillas, as most of the American advisers were instructing them in the style of conventional warfare as seen in Korea.

North Vietnam
In North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh focused on rebuilding devastated North Vietnam, and the communists imposed Maoist land reforms which left thousands of pro-French landlords and many villagers dead. Ho Chi Minh was war of conflict with South Vietnam, cautioning his communist allies in the south against political violence and instead calling on them to become political agitators. However, southern communists found it hard to remain docile as Diem cracked down on political dissidents. In the "Denounce the Communists" campaign, Diem had tens of thousands of civilians extrajudicially imprisoned and had hundreds executed, and the communists took matters into their own hands by attacking South Vietnamese officials. In North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh began to share power with more aggressive leaders such as Le Duan, who carried the will of southern communists to the north. By 1959, Le Duan and his allies were gaining influence within the North Vietnamese Politburo and began to change its policy, arguing that Hanoi should do everything within its power to help the southern revolutionarires overthrow Diem and unify the country at every cost. Bands of 40-50 armed Viet Minh began slipping into South Vietnam, forging jungle paths through the Laotian mountains and founding the Ho Chi Minh trail. Violence against the Diem regime steadily increased, and, on 8 July 1959, at Bien Hoa, 6 American military advisers were shot at by Viet Minh guerrillas as they watched a movie at their compound, and two of them were killed, the first Americans to be killed in Vietnam.

On 8 November 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States, defeating Republican Vice President Richard Nixon. Both candidates had pledged to hold the line against international communism, but the public was unaware of the situation in Vietnam. Six weeks later, at the remote jungle village of Tun Lap near the Cambodian border, representatives of southern revolutionary groups united as the National Liberation Front (nicknamed by the South Vietnamese as the "Viet Cong", meaning "communist traitors to the Vietnamese nation") to oppose Diem and oust the foreigners supporting him. Le Duan and his comrades in Hanoi orchestrated everything from behind the scenes, and, on 20 January 1961, President Kennedy promised that the USA would support and friend and oppose any foe to ensure the survival and success of liberty.